The reason I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I the...refore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business..., he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murde...rous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real th...an nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurtDrag out to their last dregs and I resume...On such legs as are left me, in such heartAs I can manage, remember to go home,My taste will not have turned insensitiveTo honey and bread old purity could love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta ...of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies--all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »